BIOTECH: Life Technologies, merged and growing

LA JOLLA  As biotechnology extends its reach, Life Technologies is moving with it.

Created last year by the merger of Invitrogen Corp. and Applied Biosystems, Life Technologies sells chemicals and research tools under the Invitrogen brand. It sells sophisticated scientific instruments under the Applied Biosystems name.

Gregory Lucier , the company's chief executive, says the merger created a company with the product base to supply the vast needs of biological research and the economies of scale to compete with the biggest rivals.

From just a few drugs in the beginning, biotech's scope has steadily widened and shows no sign of slowing down, Lucier said.

"We started with basic antibodies, we then moved into proteins, and now we're moving into using whole cells for therapy. And that's just getting going," Lucier said.

To meet that need, Life Technologies offers more than 50,000 products, from stem-cell culturing kits to machines that can read out a person's total genetic code, or genome, for less than $10,000.

In a few years, the cost of genome analysis on Life Technologies machines will be down to $1,000 a person, making it financially feasible for individual medical exams, Lucier said. By comparison, the Human Genome Project, completed nine years ago, created the first genome map for $3 billion.

Greg Lucier, chairman and CEO of Life Technologies, speaks on a panel about the future of regenerative medicine.
— Bradley J. Fikes

Greg Lucier, chairman and CEO of Life Technologies, speaks on a panel about the future of regenerative medicine.
/ Bradley J. Fikes

Determining a person's exact genetic makeup will identify any predispositions to diseases, and help doctors find what drugs will work best on that person, a field known as "personalized medicine."

A veteran of General Electric Co., Lucier joined Invitrogen as chief executive in 2003, and steered the company through acquisitions that quickly bulked up the company, which by 2008 employed about 1,000 people in Carlsbad.

Today, about 1,200 work in Carlsbad, including contract and part-time employees, Lucier said. Companywide, the payroll is 9,500. And the company is hiring. More than 200 jobs are open, 79 in Carlsbad.

Growth amid recession

Even during the economic downturn, demand for the company's products, especially the one-use "consumables," continues strong, Lucier said. And the federal stimulus bill will help that demand, he said.

The stimulus bill provides $10 billion to the National Institutes of Health, the largest single funder of biomedical research in the United States.

"That has to be spent in the next two years or so, and a lot of that money will find its way to our customers," Lucier said. "They will need to order things, and that will find its way to Life Technologies."

However, analyst Jeffrey Stafford wrote in a recent report that Life Technologies has high hurdles to clear to realize its ambitions to keep growing.

These hurdles include paying back the $2.5 billion debt it incurred to finance the merger, and producing a constant supply of new products.

New technology is constantly being discovered in the life sciences, wrote Stafford, who covers Life Technologies for Morningstar, a Chicago-based research firm. That technology enables established competitors as well as startups to enter the market.

In business-speak, Stafford wrote, there are few "barriers to entry" for competitors.

"To stay ahead, Life must continue to innovate or choose attractive licensing partners -- not always an easy task, considering the amount of competition in the industry," Stafford wrote in the report, released Feb. 26.